News from Germany: authoring company Imagion completed work on the Blu-ray version of Big Buck Bunny! They’ve created a stunning HDTV (1080p 24fps) version of our movie based on the original HDR frames of the movie. The master has been sent to the factory for duplication last friday. This will take about 4 weeks, so we expect the discs here end of july. Visit the Blender e-shop to purchase a copy!

Although it’s a closed format still, Blu-ray is most likely going to be the HDTV film disc format of the next decade. So, even when it was only for archiving reasons, it’s important to have BBB on this format available as well. Not to mention that the HD version of BBB is simply breathtaking to watch.

As bonus, apart from the extras copied from the video dvd, Imagion agreed to add Elephants Dream on the disc as well!

-Ton-

The whole Peach team wishes Enrico and Micaela all the best for today,

because they are getting married!

Have a beautiful day and of course lot’s of love for the future.

Congratulazioni, tutta la fortuna per il futuro!

The Making of “Big Buck Bunny”: An Open-Source Evolution
Wednesday, 13 August, 8:30 – 10:15 am
Petree Hall C

In May 2008, the Blender Foundation released their second open-movie project: “Big Buck Bunny,” a funny and furry 3D short about a giant rabbit who gets even with bullying rodents. This session brings together the key people who created the movie and presents all the aspects of an open-source and open-content-based animation studio, and how this affects the creative process. The panelists showcase project files from the studio, and even recreate parts of the film on demand! This 90 minute session starts with a screening the 10-minute film and ends with a 15-minute Q&A with the audience.

http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/caf/caftalks/index.php

An article about Blender and the making of BBB of 8 pages has been printed in the June issue of Linux Pro Italian magazine, with short (boxes) interviews with Enrico, Sacha and Andy.

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Big Buck Bunny has been awarded for a ‘special mention’ from the jury of Cyborg FilmFestival within the section animation.

BIG BUCK BUNNY of SACHA GOEDEGEBURE
The Netherlands 2008
“Such mention, intends to underline the great ability with which has been completed the creation of characters animate of the work and their character animation able to absolutely return an expressiveness worthy of products commercial high-level, and such mention, wants besides, to be the occasion to underline the important value of a software 3D as Blender, with which the work has entirely been realized, and that it opens a ‘important reflection on the value of the open source and of the free software in the professional and commercial world.” thus Luisella Chiribini

http://www.cyborgproduzioni.org/

Here’s stats from the past week:

Vimeo: 300,000
Youtube 215,000

Downloads:

Waag.org torrents: 102,000
Sun Microsystems network.com: 120,000 (estimate, reported 29 TB traffic)
Sketchworkproductions.com: 125,000
video.blendertestbuilds.de: 55,000

Grand total: 917,000! Pretty good numbers. Without counting all the other mirrors, iso dowloads, our own dvds, and assuming more people watch a single download, we can safely estimate that over a million people have seen BBB now!

-Ton-

(Note; I did not include the italian mirror, which is most likely between 50 and 100k too. Waiting for their confirmation.)

Wheee, my first blog post. Sorry that I’m late to the party :) The complete score is now online for your listening pleasure. It consists of 10 tracks, including the bits I did for the DVD menus, and is available both in MP3 and high-quality Ogg Vorbis formats. Grab it while it’s hot:

MP3, ~192 kbps VBR, 16.2 MB ZIP

Ogg Vorbis, ~224 kbps, 17.8 MB ZIP

The isolated score is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 license. Thanks to Andy for the neat cover image. Enjoy!

We’ve collected several mirrors worldwide for a stable and – hopefully fast – hosting of the BBB movies. You can download the files in four different flavours, which will nicely work for all common video players and OSes.
The download section also has Vimeo and Youtube links for streaming video.
Lastly, mirrors with the DVD ROM studio files are also being added now!

Have fun watching! And, thanks again for the great feedback and ongoing support. It has been a great ride for everyone here, and I definitely look forward to the next open movie… which – as promised – will not start before the Blender 2.5 project is in usable state. Most likely that’s end of 2008, early 2009.

Lastly: don’t stop buying the DVD! Revenues will be used as startup financing for the next Open Movie, and hopefully I can afford to send the full Peach team to Siggraph…

-Ton-

One of the benefits of being one of the creators of an open movie like BBB, is that you get to show it in different places all over the world. And that’s exactly what we want, Blender worldwide.

One event I’m extremely happy about is CG Overdrive in Singapore, Asia’s biggest Computer Graphics conference (some of you might have already read about it on BlenderNation).

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We have shipped everything to Europe and rest of world last tuesday, May 20th. Some close Europe countries might arrive already this week friday or saturday. Dutch orders are being shipped today, and arrive friday. (Well, there’s rumours the Dutch Mail will strike…)

So, we hope almost everyone can their own home-cinema premiere during the next 10 days. In the mean time we’ll build a large network of http mirrors, torrents, and streams to make sure we can do the public movie launch on May 30 or 31st. Keep tuned!

In anticipation of the DVDs, we’ve upgraded the gallery with a couple of final frames from the movie. Also check the press section for a great story about BBB in today’s Netherlands largest quality news paper.

Finally: please mark in the Frappr map below when you get the DVD. Makes it a review of our shipping company as well. :)

http://www.frappr.com/?a=constellation_map&mapid=137440549214